Another cool program

Add Evernote (www.evernote.com) to the list of productive free software. I really like this program.

Interesting websites that I've come across

Since I haven't posted in quite a while, i thought it might be useful to list the websites and applications that I've found or started using recently that have some sort of interesting quality.

www.gyminee.com - a website that helps you track weight loss, calorie intake, and come up with exercise programs.

www.google.com/reader - an RSS feed reader that allows you to read many news feeds from tons of websites, quickly and easily

mail.google.com - gmail keeps getting better and better with free POP and IMAP so that I can read it on my Windows Mail program as well as new and helpful features being added monthly it seems.

www.facebook.com - it's just fun

www.anyvite.com - you can invite freinds to a gathering and set up a mini-blog for the event.  Friends can accept your invitation without having to register on the website to say yes / no / maybe.  Plus, after the event you can add pictures and video.

www.igoogle.com - a personalized web page of google with tons of gadgets to choose from.  A good homepage for some

www.go2web20.net - a list of "web 2.0" sites.

www.todoist.com - a nice small to-do website (I still like Outlook better though)

del.icio.us - bookmarks stored online and syncronized with my firefox

APPLICATIONS

Launchy - press alt-space to bring up the launcher, which indexes your desktop and computer and can launch pretty much anything with a little tweaking.  I have set up (for instance) a launcher called "gtf" and "gte" which brings up google translate and translates the phrase that I give it.  For example if I want to know what "ca va" means in english, I type alt+space gtf [TAB] ca va and press enter and it immediatly brings me to the google translate website with the translation of ca va.  It's very useful for those long french e-mails that I get every so often.

OpenOffice 3.0 - looks much better than it's 2.0 counterpart and is a free alternative to the Microsoft Office suite.

Playon by MediaMall - lets you stream Hulu, CBS, Netflix, ESPN through your computer to your PS3 and watch it on your TV

Yeah, that's it for now.  I'll write more if I think of others.

Ubiquity

My previous post was sent from a Firefox add-on called ubiquity.

One of the reasons we use Mozilla Firefox rather than Internet Explorer because they seem to plug security holes a little quicker than Microsoft does.

Another reason is that there are tons of add-ons to firefox that you can get. We currently have the Delicious add-on, the get directions from google maps add-on, the weather add-on, and the download status bar add-on. Add-ons are basically small programs that add a little more functionality to the program you are using. Our weather add-on for instance, does nothing more than display the weather forecast underneath the little X button in the upper right hand corner of the screen.

The ubiquity add-on is quite a bit more robust than the weather one and it's basically an attempt to add some easy spoken language commands within firefox. I can access commands by pressing CTRL+SPACE and typing what I want.

For instance, if I'm reading a site and I run across the word "Bornholmsk". I can simply highlight the word, press ctrl-space and type wikipedia to get a definition. Or I can read ２１世紀に、国際化をよく考えなければなりません。

highlight that, press ctrl-space and type translate.

Or I can press ctrl-space and type weather Las Vegas, NV and get the weather

here's where it gets cool if you have google mail or google calendar.

I can press ctrl-space and type "email Hello how are you to jason Smith" and it will automatically bring up my g-mail and input "hello how are you" in the message and Jason Smith (my google contact) as the send to address.

Also, if I want to add an appointment to my google calendar I can simply press ctrl-space and type "add-to-calendar Meet Jason at the mall from 6pm to 7pm tomorrow" and it automatically adds a new appointment to my google calendar for tomorrow from 6 to 7pm.

There are many more commands and options and it's still in the "prototype" phase, but all-in-all it's probably one of the best little add-ons I've seen in a long time.

If you use firefox, it's worth a look.

My test of Ubiquity

I am testing Ubiquity... more to follow in my next post

Big days ahead

Well, one week from now, we will be going to closing on our first home.  We are really looking forward to it.

Brett Favre

Yesterday it was announced that Brett Favre will now be playing for the Jets. What do you think? Good or Bad? I think it will be fun to see how he adjusts to a different team and coaching style after playing on the same team for 15 years.

Fantasy Football season again

Well, it's that time of year again. Time for me to prove how little I know about football and give Fantasy Football another go. I've been playing this game with friends from Denver since 2001 and I have a blast doing it (even though I lose a lot). So wish me luck.

Historically accurate music

Here’s an interesting thing I was reminded of on the radio this morning.  Sometimes I listen to the classical music station for Boston.  I really like classical music and like to laugh at the fact that their advertising is geared more towards people with over $1 million in the bank as well.

 

This week is their compare / contrast week and this morning as I was listening, they were talking about the differences between classical music as it is played now compared to how it would have been played originally.  I’ve heard this before but was just reminded of it again this morning.

 

In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, music such as was composed by Vivaldi was performed in small chambers for high class royalty.  The composition was originally intended to have a much different sound than what we hear in today’s modern orchestras.  The instruments are much different.  The violin, for example, now has metal wound strings and a different bow.  This is not entirely for improved durability.  It was done to make the instrument louder and be able to “hit” notes faster and harder at the onset of the note.  Original violins had fiber strings and very “round” notes, meaning that you couldn’t really easily produce a short heavy hit note.  Most notes sounded more like “WOW” notes…. You know  wwwWWWAAAAaaaawwww… they had a much rounder sound.  Thus the music we hear now is much different.

 

There are several groups out there, but the one I heard this morning is called Tafelmusik.  Their intent is to produce historically accurate music that sounds more like what the composer intended.  I’m gonna check them out.

The roll up TV (OLED)

I know, I only have a few people reading this blog. I know who you are and I know most of you don’t know about all the new techie stuff out there. I thought you might like to hear about the newest TV / Display technology out there called OLEDs. It stands for Organic Light Emitting Diodes.

So what are the benefits to OLEDs versus LCD screens? Well, organic LEDs emit their own light (think digital alarm clock), whereas regular LCD screens have to have a backlight (think IronMan wrist watch in the dark). The main complaint of LCD screens is that none of them have “true black” color when you are watching TV. There is always some light coming through from the back of the screen. OLEDs can completely turn themselves off and on so we can have true black color in a screen that is thinner than an LCD screen. This translates into something called contrast ratio. Contrast ratio was important to me when I went shopping for a new TV and we got a great one at 25,000:1, a really good contrast ratio for an LCD screen. OLED contrast ratios are around 1,000,000:1 (a slight 4,000% improvement over the LCD). OLEDs also don’t have to “cool down” and can reproduce fast action much better than LCDs can. It’s last benefit? They are rather skinny. I mean 3mm thin! For the metric challenged of us, including myself, a US Quarter is approximately 1 ¾ mm thick. So this TV is a little skinnier than 2 quarters stacked together. It doesn’t appear to be bendable, but that was the original idea of OLEDs. The 11” XEL-1 Sony OLED digital television can be yours for only $2,500 at the Sony Style store. That’s right folks, you too can own one for less than the price of a tank of gas (1 year from now).

I’m waiting for news of my rollup laptop any day now.

TV Product Placementpalooza

As television grows more user specific, we head away from the “free TV” paid by advertisement format into a new age of pay per view television. What do you think is the best option for entertainment companies? It seems everyone lately is trying to get in on the band-wagon. Should we pay for our TV and how? Currently I pay for my TV in many different ways.

1) I pay by having to watch those annoying ads (sometimes with loud sounds) that pop up and cover ½ of the viewing screen during a show that I’m watching. These ads are by far the most annoying to me, and if anything, make me avoid whatever is being advertised.

2) I pay for my satellite service. This payment goes directly to DishNetwork, then indirectly to the networks that charge them and secretly to the directors and actors, and ultimately to the government who taxes the life out of everything with less than 20 legs.

3) I pay for the convenience of fast forwarding through my commercials, which I’m sure somehow makes it to the networks, and back to the government again.

4) I pay by watching ads. Yes, if the timing is right between my clicks of the 30 second skip button, if a smart advertiser puts an interesting image up, I might just stop and watch a commercial.

5) I pay when I watch TV online by watching a long commercial at the beginning.

6) I pay by seeing product placements in TV shows

7) I now have the option of paying per episode on my Playstation 3 for some stuff.

Now I ask, since we want our TV to be somewhat subsidized by advertisements, what do you think the best way to do so is?

My opinion, I don’t think we should pay-per episode, that’s just dumb.

I think that splashing an unwanted ad during the middle of a show (which sometimes obstructs from an important plot device) is one of the worst and most annoying ideas.

So what do I like?.............Shameless product placement. That’s right folks, I want the people I watch on TV to be like normal people and have opinions about what type of soda and candy they like and what kind of shoes they like to wear. I want Rocky Balboa to look at the camera and say, “look at these beautiful pearly whites that I get when I use Crest.” But even more than that, I’d like to see companies like Coke pay to have someone spit out some Pepsi and say “Yuck, this stuff tastes disgusting.”

That’s it! I’m going to become a TV executive now. See you all on TV.

New Google Maps

Looks like Google Maps (www.maps.google.com) just got a facelift.  There there's a layer option now.

But printing the maps is where it looks like the best changes were made.  At each turn before you kick off your printer, you can now choose to print just the text OR the text with map OR the text with StreetView (Really a good option when you live in Massachusetts where they don't like to label streets or building numbers.

Great improvement Google!

Delicious.com

Back in 2003, a new website del.icio.us opened up for storing bookmarks. I discovered it a few years ago. It’s basically a site to store all your bookmarks / favorite sites / etc… and share them with others (or not). Many people use it for “social bookmarking” and that’s really how they want you to think of it. “Find sites and share them with others.”

I use it because it gives me a central location to store all my favorite websites. I can access my favorite sites from anywhere and any computer. If you use Firefox instead of internet explorer, you can get an add-in for it that will access your bookmarks and synchronize them. Here are the many uses that I love about it.

1) My home and work computers both have the add-in and all the same favorites. When I add a site at home, it gets added on my work computer. When I add a site at work, it gets added to the home computer. I guess technically it doesn’t get added to either because it’s all stored online, but you know what I mean.

2) TAGS instead of FOLDERS. This is the best thing about it. I can tag a website (say Netflix) with many tags and access them with whatever tag I want. For example, I just found a mortgage interest rate website a few days ago that helped me keep track of rates and know when I should lock in my mortgage rate. I could tag it with house, mortgage, interest, and MBS (mortgage backed securities). When I want to go back and find that site, I can search for any one of those tags and it will show up in the list. I love tags, they allow me to be “messy” with my bookmarks and still easily find whatever it is that I need. Kristen and I have over 270 bookmarks and can find everything we need very quickly.

3) You can look at your bookmarks in a cloud view (which I've just added to my blog on the right), meaning if you have 50 bookmarks with the tag “Candy” and only 1 bookmark with the tag “toothpaste”, the cloud will have large 28pt font for Candy, but small 6pt font for toothpaste. The example above would also indicate that you might want to visit a dentist.

4) The social bookmarking aspect of it is pretty cool. For instance, right now, I can see that someone has just bookmarked “50 ways to boost your energy without caffeine.” That looks interesting. However, you can choose to be more private (like myself) and only share sites that you want to share. You don’t need to share everything.

So that’s the overview.

The Del.icio.us site has always been pretty clunky and slow (with over 5 million users) from my point of view. It’s just been redesigned though, and it’s quicker, a little easier to use, and now has the actual site name delicious.com rather than del.icio.us (which I thought was kind of cool).

If you haven’t given delicious.com a try, go for it, you’ll probably like it.

Water found on Mars

NASA just released in a press conference that water has been scooped up and is being analyzed by the Mars lander “Pheonix”.  While scientists point to this as another step to proving macro-evolution, I say… hey cool! there’s water (ice) on Mars.  To see more, go to www.nasa.gov and search for Pheonix mars lander.

This is a test of posting to my blog by e-mail

I’ve never tried posting to my blog by e-mail, so I’m testing it J

What I've been working on

Today is the day… the day my department “flipped the switch” on my new streamlined spreadsheet. I’m having a blast today fielding questions and seeing the last couple months of work actually being used by the department. I can sometimes have trouble getting others to buy into changing the way they do things. It’s been said “Change is much easier when it’s done by you than when it is done to you.” I wholeheartedly agree. It’s also been said that when it comes to change, people fall in a statistical bell curve with 3% saboteurs of change and 3% change drivers, 17% resistant to change and 17% liking change, 30% don’t like change but can be convinced, and 30% like change but need to see the benefit in it. I’m on the 3% change driver section. Since I work in finance with a bunch of analyst type people, they all need to take time to digest and analyze the change before they buy in (they’re all on the 30% don’t like change side). This can be frustrating at times.

So today is a good day. They’ve flipped the switch and I’m thriving off answering questions and fixing little issues that are getting found by all the analyzer types.

The big plus is that I think I may have shaved off 2-4 hours of the entire department’s financial close time.

Google Sketchup

I've been searching for a while to find some free software that will allow me to model our new house (inside and out), and use it to figure out how to position furniture in our room and landscaping, so on and so forth.

I realize I could spend less that $100 on some landscaping & home planning software, but I majored in finance and feel that I should be able to find something for free in exchange for being bombarded by advertisements on every website I visit.

About a week ago, while looking at Google's "even more>>" section, I stumbled upon the program that they use to model all the 3d buildings in Google Earth. If you don't know what google earth is, you haven't been spending enough time with me....

The program is called Sketchup. Using it made me recall some old childhood memories. Some of my first experiences with computing were in elementary school. We started a computer class in the 5^th grade. It was fairly simple and I don’t really remember much about it other than learning some BASIC programming. You know, simple programming for 5^th graders… Anyway I learned how to write music with the beeps of the computer. One of the best things I remember is a little CAD (computer aided design) program that was the first experience I had to 3 axis stuff. I had lots of fun drawing all the lines and making a 3d house or whatever else I could think of.

Sketchup is by far the simplest modeling software I’ve ever seen, yet it’s robust enough for real designers to use. Google did it right on this one. Somehow they managed to make software that’s so easy, my four year old can use it, yet powerful enough that designers use it too.

It’s a little tough to explain in print, so I’ve added a link to a youtube video that shows you just how easy it is.

If you haven’t tried it and are the least bit interested in designing your own stuff (carpentry, room design, etc…) you should give it a try. You won’t be disappointed.